Says the Finnish maker infringes 13 Apple patents

Dec 12, 2009 10:29 GMT  ·  By

Cupertino-based company Apple announced on Friday that it filed a law suit against worldwide mobile phone leader Nokia. According to the company, the countersuit comes in response to a lawsuit Nokia filed against Apple back in October. Apple claims that the leading handset vendor is infringing 13 of its patents.

Bruce Sewell, Apple’s General Counsel and senior vice president, commented the following on the newly announced law action, “Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours.” The countersuit has been filled with the US District Court of Delaware, and says that Nokia “chose to copy the iPhone”, infringing the said patents as a result.

Here are some excerpts from the Apple filing, posted by All About Symbian: “In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device... The iPhone platform has caused a revolutionary change in the mobile phone category. In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces. As a result, Nokia has rapidly lost share in the market for high-end mobile phones... In response, Nokia chose to copy the iPhone, especially its enormously popular and patented design and user interface.”

Interestingly enough, it seems that the patents Apple claims that have been infringed are in unessential areas, while Nokia based its law suit for the infringement of patents that are considered to be essential to industry standards. However, Apple denied having infringed any patents of Nokia's and also denied that they would be essential ones. At the same time, Apple says that Nokia hasn't licensed those patents on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory basis, thus refusing licensing terms the handset vendor offered.

As for the patents that Apple says Nokia infringed, it seems that they are related to some of the latest handsets that the company delivered to the market, and phones like Nokia 5310, E71 and Nokia N900 are mentioned in the filing. At the same time, some of the infringements are supposedly applying to all Symbian S60 and S40 devices, or to all USB devices. The entire list of patents can be seen in this post on intomobile.